Historic Highways of America/Volume 5/Chapter 7

by Archer Butler Hulbert

CHAPTER VII

THE PENNSYLVANIA ROAD

SUCH had become the importance of the Pennsylvania Road that, soon after the Revolutionary struggle, Pennsylvania took active steps to improve it. On the twenty-first day of September an act of the Assembly of Pennsylvania gave birth to the great thoroughfare at first called "The Western Road to Pittsburg," and familiarly known since as the Pittsburg or the Chambersburg-Pittsburg Pike.^[1] This state road was, as heretofore recorded, one hundred and ninety-seven miles in length from Carlisle to Pittsburg. The road built in 1785–87 follows practically the course of the present highway between the same points. Here and there the traveler may see the olden track a few rods distant on his right or left; at points it lies several miles to the south. The present Pittsburg Pike passes through Greensburg, while old Hannastown on Forbes's Road lies three miles to the northwest. The old route was a little less careful as to hills than the new, and made a straighter line across the country; the telephone companies have taken advantage of this and send their wires along the easily discerned track of the old road at many points. There is no point perhaps where the old road of 1785 is so plainly to be remarked as on the side of the upper end of Long Hollow Run, Napier township, Bedford County, a few miles west of historic little Bedford.^[2]

The Pennsylvania Road and its important branch, the "Turkey Foot" Road to the Youghiogheny, became one of the important highways to the Ohio basin in the pioneer era. With the digging of the Pennsylvania canal up the valley of the Juniata, the Pennsylvania Road became less important until it became what it is today, a merely local thoroughfare. For the last two decades in the eighteenth century, the Pennsylvania Road held a preëminent position—days when a good road westward meant everything to the West. But the road could never be again what it was in the savage days of '58, '63 and '75–'82, when it was the one fortified route to the Ohio. The need for Forbes's Road passed when Forts Loudoun, Bedford, Ligonier, and Pitt were demolished. While they were standing, the open pathway between them meant everything to their defenders and to the farmers and woodsmen about them. But it meant almost as much to the fortresses far beyond in the wilderness of the Ohio Valley—Forts McIntosh, Patrick Henry, Harmar, Finney, and Washington. The vast proportion of stores and ammunition for the defenders of the Black Forest of the West passed over Forbes's Road, and its story is linked more closely than we can now realize with the occupation and the winning of the West.

Mr. McMaster has an interesting paragraph on Forbes's Road in pioneer days: "From Philadelphia ran out a road to what was then the far West. Its course after leaving the city lay through the counties of Chester and Lancaster, then sparsely settled, now thick with towns and cities and penetrated with innumerable railways, and went over the Blue Ridge mountains to Shippensburg and the little town of Bedford. Thence it wound through the beautiful hills of western Pennsylvania, and crossed the Alleghany mountains to the head-waters of the Ohio. It was known to travelers as the northern route, and was declared to be execrable. In reality it was merely a passable road, broad and level in the lowlands, narrow and dangerous in the passes of the mountains, and beset with steep declivities. Yet it was the chief highway between the Mississippi valley and the East, and was constantly travelled in the summer months by thousands of emigrants to the western country, and by long trains of wagons bringing the produce of the little farms on the banks of the Ohio to the markets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. In any other section of the country a road so frequented would have been considered as eminently pleasant and safe. But some years later the traveler who was forced to make the journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburg in his carriage and four, beheld with dread the cloud of dust which marked the slow approach of a train of wagons. For nothing excited the anger of the sturdy teamsters more than the sight of a carriage. To them it was the unmistakable mark of aristocracy, and they were indeed in a particularly good humor when they suffered the despised vehicle to draw up by the road-side without breaking the shaft, or taking off the wheels, or tumbling it over into the ditch. His troubles over, the traveler found himself at a small hamlet, then known as Pittsburg."^[3]

Forbes's Road, strictly speaking, began at Bedford, as Braddock's Road began at Cumberland. In these pages the main route from Philadelphia—the Pennsylvania Road—has been considered under the head of Forbes's Road. The eastern extremity of this thoroughfare, or the portion, sixty-six miles in length, between Philadelphia and Lancaster, became the first macadamized road in the United States and demands particular attention in another volume of this series.^[4]

Nothing could have been more surprising to the writer than to find how remarkably this road held its own in competition with the Braddock or the Cumberland Road south of it. Explain it as you will, nine-tenths of the published accounts left by travelers of the old journey from Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington into the Ohio Valley describe this Pennsylvania route. The Cumberland Road was built from Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio (1806–1818) at a cost of nearly two million dollars, yet during the entire first half of that century you will find that almost every important writer who passed over the mountains went over the Pennsylvania Road. It is exceedingly difficult to find a graphic picture of a journey over Braddock's Road before 1800; contemporaneous descriptions of a journey over the Cumberland or National Road are not numerous. On the other hand a volume could be filled with descriptions of the old Pennsylvania Road through Bedford and Ligonier. I believe the fame of the Cumberland Road was due rather to the fact of its being a national enterprise—and the first of its kind on the continent—than to any superiority it achieved over competing routes. The idea of the road was grand and it played a mighty part in the advancement of the West; but, such was the nature of its course, that it does not seem to have been the "popular route" from Washington to Pittsburg, the principal port on the Ohio River.

The Pennsylvania Road was the most important link between New England and the Ohio Valley in the days when New England was sending the bravest of its sons to become the pioneers of the rising empire in the West. True, Venable has written:

"The footsteps of a hundred years
Have echoed, since o'er Braddock's Road,
Bold Putnam and the Pioneers
Led History the way they strode.

"On wild Monongahela's stream
They launched the Mayflower of the West,
A perfect state their civic dream,
A new New World their pilgrim quest."

It is due to the Pennsylvania Road, however, to correct the history of these lofty strains. Putnam and his pioneers did not travel one step on Braddock's Road, nor did they launch their boats on wild Monongahela's stream. They came over the worn track of Forbes's Road through Carlisle and Bedford, proceeding southwest through the "Glades" to the Youghiogheny River at West Newton, Pennsylvania.^[5]

Braddock's Road would have been exceedingly roundabout for New England travelers, as Forbes long before clearly established. Pennsylvania's new road, begun in 1785, was not a tempting route of travel for these New Englanders in this year, 1788. "The roads, at that day," wrote Dr. Hildreth, "across the mountains were the worst we can imagine—cut into deep gullies on one side by mountain rains, while the other was filled with blocks of sand stone. . . As few of the emigrant wagons were provided with lock-chains for the wheels, the downward impetus was checked by a large log, or broken tree top, tied with a rope to the back of the wagon and dragged along on the ground. In other places, the road was so sideling that all the men who could be spared were required to pull at the side stays, or short ropes attached to the upper side of the wagons, to prevent their upsetting. . . All this part of the country, and as far east as Carlisle, had been, about twenty-five years before, depopulated by the depredations of the Indians. Many of the present inhabitants well remembered those days of trial, and could not see these helpless women and children moving so far away into the wilderness as Ohio, without expressing their fears. . . Three days after . . they reached the little village of Bedford. During this period they had crossed "Sideling Hill," forded some of the main branches of the Juniata, and threaded the narrow valleys along its borders. Every few miles long strings of pack-horses met them on the road, bearing heavy burthens of peltry and ginseng, the two main articles of export from the regions west of the mountains. Others overtook them loaded with kegs of spirits, salt, and bales of dry goods, on their way to the traders in Pittsburg. . . Four miles beyond Bedford, the road to the right was called the "Pittsburg Road," while that to the left was called the "Glade Road," and led to Simrel's ferry, on the Yohiogany river. This was the route of the emigrants. . ."

This imperfect glimpse of these "founders of Ohio" toiling over the Pennsylvania Road in 1788 on their way to Marietta—the vanguard of that Ohio Company which made possible the "sublime" Ordinance of 1787—is striking proof that this pathway was the link between the old and the new New England.

The Pennsylvania Road was also a common route from Baltimore and Washington; it was Arthur Lee's route to Pittsburg in 1784,^[6] and Col. John May's route from Baltimore to Pittsburg in 1788.^[7] Francis Baily, F. R. S., President of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, was one of the well-known Englishmen who left a record of experiences on this pioneer highway. In 1796 this gentleman started upon a tour from Washington to Pittsburg. He mentions no other route than the one he traversed, and it is altogether probable that he pursued the most popular. On October 7 he left Washington, and, passing through Fredericktown, Hagerstown, and Chambersburg, met the Pennsylvania Road at McConnellstown, and traveled westward on it to Pittsburg.^[8] That Mr. Baily pursued the main route westward there can be no doubt. An entry in his Journal for October 11 reads: "Chambersburg is . . a large and flourishing place, not inferior to Frederick's-town or Hagar's-town; being, like them, on the high road to the western country, it enjoys all the advantages which arise from such a continual body of people as are perpetually emigrating thither."

The celebrated Morris Birkbeck, founder of the English settlement in Illinois, journeyed from Washington, D. C., to Pittsburg, in 1817, by way of Frederickstown and Hagerstown and the Pennsylvania Road. At "McConnell's Town," under the date of May 23, he wrote in his journal: "The road we have been travelling [from Washington, D. C.] terminates at this place, where it strikes the great turnpike from Philadelphia to Pittsburg."^[9] Of the scenes about him Mr. Birkbeck writes:^[10] "Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the Ohio, of family groups. . . To give an idea of the internal movements of this vast hive, about 12,000 wagons passed between Baltimore and Philadelphia, in the last year, with from four to six, carrying from thirty-five to forty cwt. The cost of carriage is about seven dollars per cwt., from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, and the money paid for the conveyance of goods on this road, exceeds £300,000 sterling. Add to these the numerous stages loaded to the utmost, and the innumerable travellers, on horseback, on foot, and in light waggons, and you have before you a scene of bustle and business, extending over a space of three hundred miles, which is truly wonderful." Birkbeck does not mention the Cumberland Road, though it is drawn on the map accompanying his book. His advice to prospective immigrants is, in every instance, to come westward by the Pennsylvania Road.^[11]

W. Faux, the English farmer who came to America to examine Birkbeck's scheme went westward by Braddock's (Cumberland) Road.^[12] He returned to the East, however, by the Pennsylvania Road. In examining the works of a score of English travelers this was the only one I happened to find who had gone westward over the Cumberland Road. Later travelers, as Charles Augustus Murray, Martineau, and Dickens passed westward over the Pennsylvania Canal and incline railway.

No sooner did this northern canal route and railway rob the Pennsylvania and Cumberland roads of much business, than the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, in turn, took it away from the canal. The building of the railway was one of the epoch-making events in our national history; "I consider this among the most important acts of my life," affirmed the venerable Charles Carroll, the Maryland commissioner for the railway, "second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that."^[13]

For a number of years the Baltimore and Ohio Railway—the heir and assign of Braddock's Road and the famed Cumberland Road—was the great avenue of western movement and progress. But brain and muscle, even genius, cannot make two miles one mile. The shortest route across the continent was, inevitably, to become the important highway. It must be remembered that in the early days Philadelphia was the metropolis of America, and Baltimore its chief rival. As long as these cities held the balance of power and trade, a southerly route to Pittsburg, such as that of Braddock's Road, then the Cumberland Road and, finally, the Baltimore and Ohio Railway would be successful. But with the vast strides made by New York, the center of power stole northward until no route to the Ohio could compete with the most direct westward line from New York and Philadelphia.

The question then became the same old-time problem which Forbes met and decided. The straightest possible line of communication between Philadelphia and Pittsburg was equally necessary in 1860 and in 1760. The only difference was that made necessary by the doing away with the heavy grades of pioneer roads and following the water courses.

The result was the Pennsylvania Railroad—and its motto is full of significance, "Look at the Map." There is to be found the secret of its splendid success. The distance from Philadelphia to Pittsburg on the Baltimore and Ohio Railway (Connellsville route) is four hundred and thirty-eight miles. The distance between Philadelphia and Pittsburg on the Pennsylvania Railroad is three hundred and fifty-four miles—a saving of eighty-four miles. These railways do not follow the old highway routes closely but they mark their general alignment and are frequently close beside them.

"Look at the map" was practically Forbes's challenge to those who disputed his judgment a century and a half ago when he determined to build a straight road from the heart of the colonies to the strategic key of the Ohio Valley. His wisdom has been triumphantly confirmed in the present generation.

Layout 2

1. Colonial Records, vol. xv, pp. 13, 121, 273, 274, 322, 326–327, 330, 331–337, 346, 359, 431, 519, 594, 599, 635; vol. xvi, pp. 466–477.
2. Several items of interest to students of Forbes's Road will be found in History of the County of Westmorland, Pennsylvania, pp. 28–31,
3. McMaster's History of the People of the United States, vol. i, pp. 67, 68.
4. Historic Highways of America, vol. xi.
5. Darlington's note in Edes's Journal and Letters of Col. John May, of Boston, p. 31; Dr. S. P. Hildreth: Early Immigration, p. 124.
6. The Olden Time, vol. ii., p. 335.
7. Journal and Letters of Col. John May, p. 30.
8. Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America, London 1856, pp. 129–143.
9. Notes on a Journey in America, 3d edition, 1818, p. 30.
10. Id., pp. 31, 36.
11. Letters from Illinois (London 1818), pp. 52, 77; Additional Extracts, p. 111.
12. Memorable Days in America (London 1823), p. 164.
13. History and Description of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 1853, p. 20.